Blastoff! Mass Effect 2 free on Origin

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Mass Effect 2 [official site], the game I’d say mmmight be my favourite of BioWare’s fab sci-fi RPG series, is currently free through Origin. Grab it now and it’s yours for keepsies. If you’ve not played a Mass Effect before and are curious now that Mass Effect Andromeda is due in March, here you go! You’ll miss out from not having played the first game–I think a lot of ME2’s best points are built upon the first game or are interesting in juxtaposition–but I’m sure you’ll pick up what’s going on. I see that clever twinkle in your eye.

Yeah, go on then: Mass Effect 2 is my favourite of the series. What it loses in a sense of wonder and possibility from the first game, it gains in character and pulse. The over-arcing plot is wobbly guff that falls apart but the hour-to-hour stories are good stuff. I like my space friends. While I miss the less-constrained character-building, ME2 is streamlined into a far better shooter. I miss exploration but ME2 is past that groping-around, getting-a-sense-of-this-universe part. Luckily, those ME1 memories still exist within my head while playing ME2 so I can enjoy that sense of vastness without directly seeing it. A magical thing, the human mind!

And flip me, those first few minutes of Mass Effect 2 are quite something.

Mass Effect 3 is half-price now too, down to £3.99 on Origin. The Mass Effect Trilogy box set, which includes all three games but not all their DLC (you scamp, Ian Arts!), is half-price too but, uh, works out more expensive than getting ME2 free then buying the other two individually.

Hey, Ian Arts, if you want to drum up good will towards Mass Effect, try putting the old DLC on sale for once, wouldn’t you? I’d pay £15 to pick up the rest for ME2 and ME3 and go round again before Andromeda arrives. Instead, I’m slightly put out that some individual DLC packs cost as much as the games themselves, especially as some of Mass Effect 3’s shortcomings were addressed in DLC. Sort it out, yeah?

This is part of the reason I always wait for goty editions. Standard Skyrim is very cheap on sales, but the DLC costs more than the non-sale price of Skyrim and the DLC of most games is rarely discounted or merely at 50 % at best.

On Steam’s store page there is no DLC available for Mass Effect 2, which means their version of it already has all of the DLC included (what other possible reason for hiding their big, usual “DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT FOR THIS GAME” section). Therefore, I’m gonna buy it on Steam on a sale.

Another comment here and a reply at another site confirmed that Bioware has made the stupendously stupid decision to have and keep their points system. I loathe that business practice and I’m not fond of buying DLC separately either, because my Skyrim example is quite relevant for most other games as well.

I suddenly don’t feel like getting any Bioware games anytime soon. I’ll focus on the games I already own.

I finally gave in and bought loads of the Mass Effect/Dragon Age DLC when ME3 was finally on sale about a year or so ago. At that point, much of it could still only be purchased using arcane ‘Bioware Points’ and required activation through the remnants of the old Bioware Social Network dating from before they were taken over by EA. Tracking down the links to those pages was a massive faff, and the DLC wasn’t just expensive: the prices were deliberately obfuscated by tedious bullshit.

[I actually checked this a month or two ago when commenting on another story];
Funnily enough, depending on which game portal/route through BSN you use there’re different prices (and they’ve increased over time) but I don’t know that you can actually purchase through them any longer. Also Bioware Points were strangely removed from Origin completely at that time.

I gave in and bought most of the ME2 DLC prior to ME3 launching.
Though all ME2’s DLC seems to be Origin-ised now, it’s still locked behind Moon Points (inc. ME3 DLC). With Andromeda on the horizon there’s a chance it’ll get looked at again and maybe I’ll finally buy the ME3 content.

Depending on where you live in the world, DLC may be available through buying it straight through Origin, or still only through Bioware points – and said points may be stupidly expensive. I live in Australia, and it’s $16AU for 800 points, $32AU for 1600. Considering how many points some of the DLC cost, I’d be looking at $144AU to get all the DLC for ME2&3. That’s still excluding stuff like appearance and multiplayer packs. Although I’d have 720 Bioware points just sitting there, useless, afterwards – so I guess if I wanted them to do something, I COULD pick up an appearance pack or something. And then there’s still the Dragon Age 2 DLC, which uses the same system. 9.9

I’m normally one for accepting the wobbly guff and focusing on the missions so ME2 should have been right up my street. And yet, every time The Illusive Man would bookend each mission with wobbly guff about ‘building your team’ I would be screaming WHY AM I DOING THIS BUSYWORK WHEN ALL SENTIENT LIFE IS MOMENTS AWAY FROM BEING EXTERMINATED? Can’t put my finger on why this particular RPG failed to suspend disbelief when I’m usually a sucker for it. The human mind is magical all right.

Pretty sure you’re not actually capable of travelling through the Omega relay for the first 2/3 of the game. So I guess building your team is probably smarter than the other option, which is sit still and do bugger-all.

Hey Alice, it would be awesome if you could try and get an answer from EA and Bioware as to WHY the ME DLC has never been on sale for PC? I’ve spoken to Bioware people on their forums and they claim that the pricing completely comes from EA and that they have nothing to do with it. I’ve also spoken to EA people, who have (unsurprisingly) claimed the pricing comes completely from Bioware and they have nothing to do with it.

Getting an actual answer would be lovely. Perhaps when Bioware and EA are sitting down with you wonderful media types and trying to show off their new ME: Andromeda, a few pointed questions as to whether we can expect the price gouging they do on current ME DLC might cause them to rethink there strategy (or come up with a new excuse).

I still havent played ME3 (but I own it), because i refuse to play half a game. And i refuse to pay more for a single DLC, then I would pay for the entire trilogy of games. It would be lovely to know why they are such d%&ks to PC owners on this, when PS and XBOX get regular DLC discounts (one Bioware staffer tried to tell me that they had no control on PS and XBOX sales, that those came from Microsoft and Sony, and that they dont “do” sales. He became suspiciously quiet when it was pointed out that the base games regularly go on sale on Origin and Steam).

If you think the me3 dlc is half the game then you have been sorely mislead. I assume the multiplayer is now dead (shame) so that leaves the single player. The extra character was alright, but never had a spot on my team of Ashley and liara. so really, get citadel, which is like a weird epilogue that comes before the end of the game and crack on.

THIS.
What’s even more outrageous, is the Origin sale scandal a few months ago. Due to a bug you could apply a promotion code for the ME dlc-s too, meant you could buy them at -50%. But origin noticed and fixed the issue in mere hours!! So a lucky few could make the purchase, for the first time in history, pioneers of digital purchase, while the rest of us mere mortals still wait for a f*cking sale.
So yeah, any info due to this whole mess would be appreciated.

Still have an option to buy ME2 for 5€ and all DLC for gazillion Bioware points, racking up to around 20€ or so. So, thank you, but no thank you.
And gotta love the fact that Origin doesn’t show that there is shitload of DLC for Mass Effect 3 before you buy.

So, thank you very much, but no thank you.
Going to cave in and get MEA though.

I loved ME the first time round but to beat a tired old drum, THAT ending just killed it for me. I can’t play it again knowing that’s what it’s all building up to. Would you read a book again if you knew the ending was shit?

I genuinely don’t understand anyone with this opinion about ME. I admit I was fortunate enough to have played ME3 after the extended cut shenaningas, and although i wasn’t blown away, I expected a thousand time worse based on the amount of outrage.
Anyways, it may be clichéd to say so, but methinks ME is so much more about the journey itself, rather than the destination. So answering your question, yeah I would and actually DO read a book or watch a movie again, even if it has a flawed ending, knowing that everything before that is just pure gold.
And to anyone who has these issues my advice is to just go play the whole damn thing, leave ME3 citadel DLC last, and simply quit after finishing it. Just pretend that’s the true ending ;)

I think that would actually work, but I’ve seen it now! That’s one of the annoying things, they could have just left off at several points towards the end and it would have been better. It’s just an awful ending for me. It introduces a several major plot themes in the last ten minutes that Arent consistent with the 100+ hours of narrative before it, and then after building up the importance of your decisions over three full games disregards these by literally asking you to click on one of three colours.

I understand you being upset by the ending itself, but as you’ve said, it’s just the last 30 mins of hundred(s of) hours. And it’s not like we couldn’t observe the consequence of our actions (quite the opposite, basically the whole ME3 is a memento to everything we’ve done up to that point on an epic scale – I mean the subplots: genophage, geth etc.).
But let’s take another viewpoint: ME for me is also about the characters and their relations. And the (arguably) abysmal ending doesn’t make Garrus, Wrex, Tali, Liara or anyone any worse. All of them, and their actions stay with us regardless, and boy, do I cherish those memories.

While I agree with the sentiment, there are two big problems when you try to do so.
A: The ending is the culmination and big revelation to much of the main plotlines throughout the trilogy. Every time you so much as hear the word Reaper you flash back to that awful awful ending. So you spend a lot of time trying to find the answer to some big mysteries, when you know the answers are bollocks, which makes your current activities a waste of time.

B: The endings nullify any other choice in the series. It ultimately doesn’t matter who you save or not, they will probably all die or get turned into techno-ghouls or something anyway. You can try to ignore that fact, but it will probably stick to the back of your mind as you go through the games and make decisions.

I’m always perplexed that its the ending that frustrates people about ME3, and not the much longer lumps of incomprehensible stupid that come up earlier in the game (or in fact, most of the main story sections of ME2). The ending while being kinda dumb, at least offers some (daft) choices and doesn’t drag on as long as ssay, the awful intro, or the Thessia section.

I think part of it was that, at those points, you still had hope that it could get better somehow. Or that everything would start making sense later down the line. By the time you reach the ending, not only have all those annoyances and all the stupidity piled up, you now get slapped with the biggest pile of stupid in the whole game combined with the cold hard fact that this IS the story and it will never be better than this.

Also, between the multiple endless combat scenes the ending easily lasted several hours, so it wasn’t that short I think :)